PLAYLIST

Audio Tracks This feature is available only in Producer Edition

The Playlist window contains a sequence of patterns and audio tracks that form the complete song structure.

  1. Playlist Menu Button
  2. Toolbar: Draw ( P); Paint ( B); Erase ( D); Cut ( C); Select ( E); Zoom to selection ( I);
  3. Horizontal Zoom (Timeline Zoom)
  4. Time Markers
  5. Patterns Tracks
  6. Audio Tracks Vertical Zoom
  7. Audio Tracks

The bottom section of the playlist contains the audio tracks (7). The audio tracks provide the user with an easy visual way to arrange a set of large audio clips, while seeing a the waveform preview inside the tracks (see the picture). It is also possible to cut and split the audio clips in multiple pieces and arange the pieces independently on the audio tracks.

Each audio clip available in the audio tracks is in fact an instance of the Audio Clip generator. Each Audio Clip channel you add in the Step Sequencer becomes available in the audio tracks and vice versa - dropping samples on the audio tracks generates an Audio Clip channel (unless a channel exists with the same sample).

Basic Operations

To place an audio clip, switch to draw () or paint () mode and left-click in an audio track (of no Audio Clip channels exist, you will see a dialog where you can browse for a sample to be used). Paint mode allows you to draw multiple instances of the audio clip at once (hold the mouse button and drag).

To erase an audio clip, click it with your right mouse button or use the left mouse button in erase () mode.

To switch an audio clip instance to play another Audio Clip channel, open the clip menu (left-click the arrow in the top left corner of the clip) and from the Select Channel menu, pick an Audio Clip channel to switch to.

To open the Channel Settings of the channel associated with the audio clip instance, open the clip menu and select Channel Settings.

From the clip menu, select Preview to listen to the audio clip sample (hit the Stop button in the Transport panel to stop the preview).

Splitting and Regions

A powerfull feature of audio clips is the ability to split them in pieces and arrange the pieces independently on the audio tracks. Here are the methods you can use to split an audio clip in multiple pieces:

1. Using the Cut tool () - Select the Cut tool. Go to the audio tracks, press and hold the left mouse button. Now drag to define the "cut line" slope and length, then release the button. All audio clips that intersect with the line are splitted at the intersection point.

2. Split on each beat / bar - You can split your audio clips on even pieces for each bar or beat in the timeline. Open the clip menu and from the Chop into menu select Bar or Beat to split in bars or beats, respectively. Beat (Random) splits the audio clip in beats and reorders the resulting pieces in a random order.

3. Autodetect - FL Studio can split your audio clip using its integrated BeatSlicer engine. To auto-split an audio clip, open its menu and from the Chop into menu select Autodetect.

4. Precise split using external cue points - FL Studio reads the cue points embedded in all samples used as audio clips. Cue points can be inserted in most of the popular wave editors, such as Cool Edit® and SoundForge®. Cue points allow you to create perfectly accurate regions inside the waveform. You also can take advantage of 3rd party tools which create those regions automatically based on a special analisys of the sample (for ex. BeatSlicer, which marks the start of each detected beat with a cue point) and then split the regioned clip in FL Studio.

To split an audio clip into regions, open the clip menu and from the Chop into menu select Regions (if the wave doesn't contain regions, this command is disabled).

You can also directly set an audio clip to show only a specific region contained in the sample. To do so, open the clip menu, and from the Select Region menu select a region name, or select Full Sample to show again the full audio sample (only Full Sample is available for clips without regions).